Leading is one of the most noble, difficult, and rewarding things a person can do. The pressure to deliver results can feel overwhelming when things aren’t going to plan, yet meaningful and fun when things are going well. The human experience is complex, and relationships are the key to everything. With the Great Resignation looming and the War on Talent at an all-time high, the way we lead teams when times are hard will make all the difference in not just your retention, but also in the health and well-being of the whole organization.
Why won’t my team do what they say they will? Why aren’t they proactive? Why don’t they speak up? How do I get people to care about and own their work? How do I get my people to stay?!
If you find yourself asking these questions, let’s reflect for a moment: What meaning are you applying to your team’s behavior? It’s easy to make judgments about intent and think they’re being apathetic, they’re being lazy, they’re disengaged, they’re just here for the money, they’re trying to see what they can get away with, they’re gunning for my job. It’s human to make meaning from the behavior we see.
This is where I want to challenge you. All behavior makes sense—it’s a form of communication. Your people are telling you something with their behavior, and if you’re curious enough and can slow down long enough to listen, you might be surprised by what you find. Very few people (if any) wake up and think, Today I’m going to be terrible at my job. Today I’m going to be hard to work with. Everyone wants to matter; everyone wants to feel like a valuable member of the team…and yet we miss the mark and show up in ways contrary to how we see ourselves or know is expected of us. What’s going on?
Here’s a truth: Our lived experiences form the way we feel, which shapes the way we think (conscious and unconscious) and how we show up on the team. These factors ultimately add up to the effectiveness of your team. Essentially, your team has learned “the hard way” to act the way they do.
- Not speaking up? Perhaps they’ve been shot down too many times or ignored when proposing suggestions. Maybe they’ve seen their peers get publicly humiliated for asking a “dumb question.”
- Lying about or hiding a mistake/error? It’s common for managers to overreact to mistakes and “take it out” on their team. It only takes a few times of experiencing this personally or through others for it to feel worth it to hide or lie to avoid going through it again.
- Not following through on something they said? They may be seeing others make commitments and letting them slip without conversation. For some, they’ve learned to tell their boss what they want to hear, even if it means committing to something that’s not realistic. Others may lack the self-worth to believe they’re capable.
As humans at work, we love to think of ourselves in control of our behavior and actions. And for much of the day we are, but there are many times throughout the day where our wiring trumps our rational brain and leads us astray. It’s when we acknowledge this truth about our nature that we can personally start to own it; and as leaders, we can start creating new experiences that help rewire our team’s emotional reactions so they can show up more secure and confident in their work.
Talking about feelings doesn’t feel like “real work” to most people, but you can’t reach high performance or high reliability without it. It’s typical for leaders to try to change results by focusing on actions alone, tweaking processes and policies or creating action plans to achieve a desired state. And when the team drifts to their previous behaviors or doesn’t take ownership, we wonder why didn’t that take? Without considering the components that influence our actions (our lived experiences, our feelings, and our thoughts), changes to actions will only be superficial, temporary, and frustrating. Perhaps even more startling is the realization that the past experiences you’ve given your team have ultimately produced those unsatisfying results.
Let’s go deeper. Let’s stay curious.
Fight, Flight, or Freeze: How to Interpret Low Accountability Behavior
A lack of trust and security may be the biggest influencer of a team’s sense of accountability. For the human brain, the first order of business is survival. Our limbic system—the part of the brain that drives our behavioral and emotional responses—has the power to override just about every other brain function when we are in danger. We know this as the fight, flight, or freeze response.
We take the same brain with us from our personal lives to our work lives. Our limbic system, which is highly attentive to danger, doesn’t know the difference between work and home. Our lived experiences are how the limbic system learns to connect different situations with safety or danger. Encountering a bear in the wild would trigger a limbic response—your pulse races, cortisol is released, your breathing changes—the same way it does when the boss asks you to “come in and close the door” or calls your name in a large group. This may seem strange to some, but very real to others because we’re all triggered in different ways. But one thing that’s true for all of us is that the limbic system assumes false-positives, which means it’s hypervigilant in its desire to keep you safe. In the same way we may have a fear response to a long slender stick in a field because we think it may be a snake, we make mistakes in our interpretation of leaders’ facial expressions and actions because our brain would rather be safe and wrong than dead and right. Behind our need for survival are two core questions: What’s next? and How am I doing? When activated, the limbic system allows us to process little else.
Therefore, if your team members (based on their past experiences) don’t feel instinctively safe, they will always revert to the behavior they’ve learned as protective strategies to maintain equilibrium. In this space you will not find creativity, innovation, or the initiative to take on new responsibilities because the brain is spending A LOT of extra resources trying to manage their internal experience.
So, when you’re seeing those baffling behaviors on your team that speak to low ownership, lack of a growth mindset, or disengagement, it’s likely a strong sign of insecurity and lack of trust. When we feel like we don’t belong, like we don’t matter at work, or that we can’t learn from our failures, human beings act incongruent with who we want to be or are capable of becoming. No one is immune to this reality.
What’s a Leader to Do?
The good news is that secure connections soothe the limbic response, and that’s something you can learn and change in how you show up. When leaders can reassure their team (in the midst of their own insecurities) about what’s next and how they’re doing, they will trigger oxytocin, which brings out a more secure response in their people. Behind every interaction people are asking, Are you there for me? Do I matter to you? If you can help them answer yes, you will bring out the best in them.
Over six decades ago, psychologist John Bowlby established the theory (attachment theory) that humans fail to thrive (literally die) without a secure relationship. The implication for leaders is that in times of stress or distress, your followers reach for you much like they might a parent or loved one looking for support and reassurance. When they receive support and guidance, they are soothed, and when they don’t, they become triggered. One study on leaders as attachment figures described an effective leader like this:
Effective leaders are sensitive and responsive to their followers’ needs; provide advice, guidance, and emotional and technical resources to group members; support their followers’ creativity, initiative, and autonomy; enhance their followers’ self-worth and self-efficacy; support their followers’ desire to take on new challenges and acquire new skills; affirm their followers’ ability to deal with challenges; and encourage their followers’ personal growth.
Easy, right? Not at all. Leaders get triggered just like everyone else and feel the pressure to deliver results, which can make it hard to show up in difficult moments with patience, curiosity, and compassion. That’s why it’s imperative that leaders accept that they’re never perfect, and when they miss the mark, they are quick to repair and reconnect with their people. The process of embracing tensions and healing conflict creates a new kind of experience that reinforces the belief that there’s nothing (or very little) someone can do that they can’t work out and learn from together. That’s resilience. It’s ironic, but in many cases, the best way to help people be accountable and recover from stressful times is to let go of the outcomes long enough for people to believe they are more important than what they do. That’s when they will surprise you with what they are capable of at work—and life.
It’s time for a different kind of leader—a secure leader.
Want to dive deeper? Watch our webinar on The Neuroscience of Accountability, during which we discuss how our brains (and hearts) process accountability, and how leaders can leverage that knowledge to achieve different results.
